I’ve taken a—I think reflexively contrarian—stance on AI use. I’ve argued that AI art is art, AI writing is writing, AI companions are companions, and so on and so forth. Part of this is because I really do believe what I say — an AI friend is not the same as a human or animal friend, but I don’t think they’re nothing. But it’s also influenced by an oppositional disposition. I have a strong allergy to self-righteousness of any kind. I can’t help but think, “Who do you think you are?” — even while holding that these are not necessarily corporations that need defending.
This tendency has bitten me in the ass several times, and it will bite me in the ass again. It’s also led me to aggressively hold a lot of wrong, sometimes straightforwardly bad, opinions on principle. And I’m starting to think my pro-AI posture is one of those.
Recently, I started logging into Facebook again, mostly to do the depressing thing of posting photos of my children to my late father’s wall. One of the interesting things about Facebook is that it forces me to exit my bubble of people who work in tech and media, and thus are very tech and media literate. The people I see on Facebook inhabit a completely different universe than the ones I see on X or Substack or even TikTok much of the time. I don’t love referring to the people I grew up with as “normies,” but, you know, many of them are normies.
Anyway, I log in and suddenly I’m surrounded by normies and I stumble across something that’s forced me to reconsider some things.
A girl I went to high school with—let’s call her Teresa—has written a book and self-published it on Amazon. As you can imagine, given the preamble to this story, the book is completely AI-generated. I don’t even want to risk saying what it’s about because, even though it’s not really a distinctive story and would be difficult to find from the description alone—I don’t know. The guy I lost my virginity to once emailed me after I mentioned him here, so who knows who else is lurking on this newsletter.
It’s not just that the book is AI-generated: all the posts leading up to it are AI-generated, the marketing collateral is AI-generated, and the woman has even AI-generated an image of herself and her late father with a lengthy, saccharine “We did it!” caption. All of this is, I guess, not that big of a deal, and really shouldn’t be given the other contents of this blog. My husband suggested that maybe it’s a grift to make money, even if a misguided one. All of this is maybe an afternoon’s worth of work, he says.
But I don’t think it’s a grift! It’s far too messy and personal to be a grift. She seems far too invested.
She made shirts. She has a community for her readers. She paid a PR service to submit a fake press release about her book to various local newspapers. The press release is AI-generated. She created or purchased a web of fake Goodreads accounts with AI-generated names and profile photos to give her book five-star reviews. The reviews are AI-generated. And then, the other day, just when I thought it couldn’t escalate any further, I saw that she’d posted photos of the notes for her book. You guessed it: the photos are AI-generated, as is the caption describing what they are.
I don’t really want to litigate whether or not her book is actually a book. Whatever—people self-publish a lot of shit. But I am interested in the larger dynamic. It can’t possibly be that rare, one, and two, how are we supposed to think about what she’s doing?
Lying is wrong, but it’s also contextual. We lie to people every day about all sorts of things. I’m not so autistic that I can’t wrap my mind around lies that are told for a reason. I’m also probably more compassionate than most about people who nurture delusions for their own private reasons. I’m not going to tell the 25-year-old who needs to believe she’s a human-alien hybrid that she probably isn’t one, and I’m not going to tell the kid who dresses up as Spider-Man longer than is developmentally appropriate that he’s not Spider-Man. Maybe it expresses a type of truth. Maybe it’s therapy. Maybe they’re just role-playing, because they need to right now, and they’ll eventually grow out of it.
There’s a part of me that really wants to ask: who is Teresa really harming with this journey as a fake author besides herself? And that’s assuming her peers even see her as dishonest or foolish. They might be indifferent, or they might not know what she’s doing. They might think she actually wrote this book.
My husband thinks the stakes are low, that I’m overthinking it. Worst case, she loses a few bucks on these fake press releases and her ChatGPT subscription; best case, she makes a few bucks on Amazon KDP. Psychologically, worst case, she convinces herself she’s an author when she’s not and then somebody comes around and rains on her parade. Best case, nobody disabuses her of her delusion, and she continues playing dolls on Facebook, thinking this is real life, totally unabated.
Would I feel so conflicted if she were simply overconfident about a book she had actually written? If her web of catfish profiles were not AI-generated, but created by hand, photos stolen instead of generated? If she truly believed she was the greatest writer ever to have lived, but she actually wrote—even if the writing was preposterously bad? Would that somehow be worse? Would it be, in its own way, better? Would it be a disservice then to allow her to keep believing she’s Spider-Man long after she’s outgrown the costume?
She just wants to feel special, and logging on to Facebook to post about her fake book makes her feel that way. Is it my business? Or is it antisocial to act like it isn’t? Is it any less antisocial to treat her as someone who needs compassion, when that compassion may secretly be little more than self-flattering pity? Some part of her must know, deep down, that she didn’t really write a book and that it’s all pretend. That she won’t get a million fans, a million readers, a million people who actually love it—love her.
I’ve always thought it was more humane to let people like that do what they need to do. After all, I know my dad can’t see the pictures of my girls. But it makes me feel better to post them nonetheless. And I hate it when people see those posts and ask me if I’m okay or if I want to talk. I would prefer they just like the pictures and move on.
Maybe that’s what Teresa wants too. Not that we believe her, exactly, not that we enable her, but that we don’t break the spell.
I think if she was merely deluded about the merit of self-publishing a book on Amazon, I'd just think she was merely lying to herself, but going to the effort of fabricating all the extra stuff with AI is a calculated deception and shows a lack of integrity.
As someone who used to get paid to write and/or "edit" (i.e., rewrite entirely) these books for people in the before-times, I can assure you things have not changed all that much with AI